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Personal Project Reflection

For my personal project, I created a film critiquing blog through the Global Context of personal and cultural expression.

Reflecting

Film critiquing took more time and was more difficult than originally anticipated. But I also learned that film critiquing is very similar to analyzing any other art form.

Looking at my project through the lens of personal and cultural expression I learned that art always has a lot of connection with the psychology and relationship of the viewer and creator, with their own experiences and their perception of the world. By learning and practicing film critique, I learned that film is a media in which the creator and the viewer communicate. Through the film, the creator shows the audience the world through their lens, the audience sees this and creates meaning and learns more through this new lens.

After successfully going through and reflecting on my personal project, I learned how important it was to my learning. One of the reasons the personal project is so important is because it helps you become more independent in decision-making. In school, you are often told what to do, but outside of school, we are left to make decisions by ourselves. By going through the personal project, we become more independent as well as better decision makers. The personal project is also important because it teaches students to decide on one thing they would like to achieve, then figure out how to reach that goal by themselves. Although it spans a period of less than a year, it helps on a larger scale. For example, I want to become a successful actor, so I would study film and advance toward my goal. The third most important thing you learn during the personal project is persistence. For a project that takes months to complete, you must continuously work on it to keep the momentum.

In this project, I expressed a lot of skills as a thinker. I made sure that all of my notes and process journal entries were clearly organized so that I would not struggle to look through my notes later on. This helped me when I was writing my blog posts, because I could continue to look back at the knowledge I had acquired throughout my research period and refer to that knowledge on the posts. When I interviewed Professor Ainge, I made sure to record the interview and take notes by listening to the recording multiple times. I also made sure to create to-do lists whenever I could, in order to understand the steps I needed to take next to reach my goal. As I was not able to use my action plan as effectively as I would have liked, having short-term to-do lists turned out to be a better approach for my process.

During this project, I improved as a risk-taker. The biggest risk I took throughout this project was choosing a topic on which I barely knew anything. Being an ambitious student, I decided to challenge my limits of absorbing and learning new information in a short amount of time. I had not had a lot of time, as I was new to the school and had less time for research. I had not fully prepared to interview Professor Ainge. With the short amount of time I had, I wrote down questions I could ask, which ended up being extremely beneficial.

During this project, I continued to be a communicator. I had to make sure to collaborate with many people to create my final product. I had to communicate with my mentor as well as Professor Ainge and my peers. I made sure that in sent emails, I used the correct, formal language where I included all the information needed to understand the context of the emails. Not only this, in my exhibition I made sure to convey my product, my goal, and my knowledge as clearly and succinctly as possible to make sure the guests received as much as they could from my exhibit.

Throughout the personal project, I spent a lot of time reflecting on my work and my process of working. Whenever I sat down to work on my personal project, I made sure to reflect and if I hadn’t reflected, I created a reflection for a collection of events that had happened since the last entry. At one point in my project, I had gotten stuck because I had been too ambitious. I then decided to adapt my final product, so it would be more achievable in the given time.

Conclusion

Although the personal project is not something that I particularly enjoyed while doing, as it is difficult, time-consuming, not to say stressful, the feeling of accomplishment I felt when I finally finished, standing in front of something I was proud of, that I created by putting in all of that effort, is what makes it such an important learning experience. As I reflect on the personal project, and knowing the struggles I went through, I feel proud of the product, but not only that I realize all of the new skills I’ve learned by going through the process.

The things I have learned in the personal project will help me in other aspects of my life in the future. This includes not only knowledge on film critiquing but also the skills I developed by completing the personal project.